Friday, 9 February 2024

A tale of two rules violations

In Mark's absence gallivanting around the healthcare system, just putting in a quick report on the recent KO cup semi-final. I'll get the boring chess out the way quickly; we beat Banbury 3.5-1.5, with wins for Javier (comfortably), Andy P (concerningly, from a dubious position where he had 6 isolated pawns) and myself (very dubiously, winning a pawn down endgame for one of many times in my life). That takes us into a final against Stratford, for which hopefully Mark will be back to write something more interesting than I can manage.

Speaking of uninteresting things I'm writing, the main thing I wanted to bring up were two rules issues that occurred on the night, which others may know more about how they should have been resolved than I did.

1) About 2 hours into the match, it was noticed that two of the clocks had been set up incorrectly (by our Banbury hosts I hasten to add, and not by us), and did not have an increment on them. For anyone particularly boring who wants to know how, they had been set up as 15 minutes and 10 seconds with a 0 second increment, rather than 15 minutes and 0 seconds with a 10 second increment. The question then was what to do. In my official position as the only man who can work the clocks, I suggested we put the increment on from that move onwards, but not add any time for the moves that had elapsed. Was this correct? You could have added back the increment time, or left it without increment because it had started that way. No-one had any better suggestions at the time, but I'm certainly not sure of the correct rules.

2) Andy Baruch was playing Nathan Manley on board 4. In Nathan's traditional style he got short of time very quickly (this was also one of the boards without increment, which didn't help him at all). He got down to less than 5 minutes and so correctly stopped recording his moves. Andy, I think slightly thrown by how fast his opponent was now playing, also forgot to record his moves. A couple of times Nathan reminded him and Andy would start again, but forget a few moves down the line. I took no action at this as I'm fairly confident I'm not allowed to interrupt the game unless one of the players stops the clock to raise something. However, if Nathan had done this, what would have been the correct response? Give him two extra minutes and remind Andy to record from that point on. Make Andy catch up on all the moves he has missed before he plays again? Something else?

Fortunately, none of this affected our overall victory in the match, but I would be interested in knowing the answers, if anyone has them.

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